Security, et al

How to Audit Privileged Operations and Mailbox Access in Office 365 Exchange Online

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 12:40:20 GMT

Moving Exchange to the Office 365 cloud eliminates a lot of
work but it doesn’t eliminate your compliance responsibilities or security
requirements. To be compliant and to
detect information grabs and data theft you need 2 critical feeds of activity
from Exchange Online:

Exchange Online provides the ability to monitor both. And if you are familiar with Exchange
on-premise you will find a degree of shared functionality – at least on the
surface.

For instance, the configuration of mailbox audit policy and
of the admin audit log use the same 2 PowerShell commands as Exchange
on-premise

Set-Mailbox and all the “-Audit…” parameters

Set-AdminAuditLogConfig

But as with Exchange on-premise, getting the audit data out of Exchange Online is nowhere as
easy. Especially with regard to mailbox
auditing. The Search-MailboxAuditLog
command that runs synchronously has restrictions on the amount of detail that
eliminates it from consideration. The
asynchronous New-MailboxAuditLogSearch command has restrictions (also found in
Exchange 2016) that silently limits you to 10 search requests in any 12-hour
period. And those search requests have
caps on the amount of results and can take many hours to be fulfilled.

On the interactive side, Office 365 provides an Audit and
Compliance portal that allows you to perform ad hoc searches against the “unified
audit log” which includes Exchange Online audit events. However this portal is really only
appropriate for fairly casual investigations into recent activity. You are limited to certain pre-conceived
search scenarios of which viewing content of mailboxes is conspicuously
absent. Perhaps most importantly, Office
365 only keeps audit data for 90 days.

So how does an enterprise fulfill their compliance
requirements? Microsoft is certainly not
unaware of compliance and the fact that they can’t go to market without giving
customers some options. Right now there
is just one option: the Management Activity API. This RESTful service does provide an
enterprise-grade ability to get all your audit data out of Office 365. But it requires custom programming and at
that point you’ve only gotten the audit data out of the cloud in XML
format. What do you do with it
then? Never mind the rest of the
compliance story such as reporting, alerting, archiving and so on. And if I was a cyber security officer I’d
want to be able to correlate that activity in the cloud with everything else
going on in my network.

That’s where Quest Change Auditor comes in. The folks at Quest have done the heavy
lifting to integrate audit logs from Exchange Online with the rest of the activity
they collect, normalize and monitor from all over your network. The latest version of Change Auditor
implements the Management Activity API and other APIs from Office 365 to
automatically collect Exchange Online mailbox and administrator audit logs. Change Auditor brings to Exchange Online the
same Who, What, When, Where,
and what Workstation capability ChangeAuditor is famous for. And the cool thing is now you see what a
given user like Bob is doing both in the cloud and on your internal network
because ChangeAuditor already monitors

Active Directory

Azure AD

Windows

SharePoint

SQL Server

Network Attached Storage - EMC, NetApp, Dell FluidFS

Skype for Business/Lync

VMware

You can’t be secure
and compliant without monitoring your environment and that fact doesn’t go away
when you move to the cloud. Office 365
captures the activity required by enterprises for compliance but it’s up to you
after that. Change Auditor simplifies the audit process by tracking, auditing,
reporting and alerting on Microsoft® Exchange Server and Office 365 Exchange
Online configuration and permission changes in real time, and solves
this issue by combining cloud activity and on-premise activity on the same pane of
glass. To ensure Exchange and Office 365
compliance, you can automatically generate intelligent, in-depth reports,
protecting you against policy violations and avoiding the risks and errors
associated with day-to-day modifications. And, for fast troubleshooting, you
always get the original and current values.

How to control and detect users logging onto unauthorized computers

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 11:08:40 GMT

indows gives you several ways to control which computers a
given account can logon to. Leveraging
these features is a critical way to defend against persistent attackers. By limiting accounts to appropriate computers
you can

The first place to start using mitigation technique is with
privileged accounts. And the easiest way
to restrict accounts to specified computers is with the allow and deny logon
rights. In Group Policy under User
Rights you will find an allow and deny right for each of Windows’ 5 types of
logon sessions

Service (when a service is started in the
background it’s service account is logged on in this type of session)

Batch (i.e. Scheduled Task)

Of course if an account has both “Logon locally” and “Deny
logon locally” the deny right will take precedence. By careful architecture of
OUs, group policy objects and user groups you can assign these rights to the
desired combinations of computers and users.

But because of the indirect nature of group policy and the
many objects involved it can be complicated to configure the rights
correctly. It’s easy to leave gaps in
your controls or inadvertently prevent appropriate logon scenarios.

In Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft introduced
Authentication Policy Silos. Whereas
logon rights are enforced at the member computer level, silos are enforced
centrally by the domain controller. Basically
you create an Authentication Policy Silo container and assign the desired user
accounts and computers to that silo. Now
those user accounts can only be used for logging on to computers in that
silo. Domain controllers only enforce
silo restrictions when processing Kerberos authentication requests – not
NTLM. To prevent users accounts from
bypassing silo restrictions by authenticating via NTLM silo’d accounts must
also be members of the new Protected Users group. Membership in Protected Users triggers a
number of different controls designed to prevent pass-the-hash and related
credential attacks – including disabling NTLM for member accounts.

For what it’s worth Active Directory has one other way to
configure logon restrictions and that’s with the Logon Workstations setting on
domain user accounts. However, this
setting only applies to interactive logons and offers no control over the other
logon session types.

Detecting Logon Violation Attempts

You can monitor failed attempts to violate both types of
logon restrictions. When you attempt to
logon but fail because you have not been granted or are explicitly denied a
given logon right here’s what to expect in the security log.

Which Security Log

Event ID

Notes

Local computer being attempted for
logon

4625

Logon Failure

Failure reason: The
user has not been granted the requested logon type at this machine.

Status: 0xC000015B

Domain Controller

4768

Successful Kerberos TGT Request

Note that this is a successful
event. To the domain controller this
was as a successful authentication.

As you can see there is no centralized audit log record of
logon failures due to logon right restrictions. You must collector and monitor the logs of each computer on the network.

On the other hand, here are the event logged when you
attempt to violate an authentication silo boundary.

Which Security Log

Event ID

Notes

Local computer being attempted for
logon

4625

Logon Failure

Failure reason: User
not allowed to logon at this computer

Status: 0xC000006E

Domain Controller

4820 Failure

A
Kerberos Ticket-granting-ticket (TGT) was denied because the device does not
meet the access control restrictions.

The
silo is identified

4768 Failed Kerberos TGT Request

Result Code: 0xC

An obvious advantage of Authentication Silos is the central
control and monitoring. Just monitor
your domain controllers for event ID 4820 and you’ll know about all attempts to
bypass your logon controls across the entire network. Additionally, event ID 4820 reports the name
of the silo which makes policy identification instant.

Restricting privileged accounts is a key control in
mitigating the risk of pass-the-hash and fighting modern attackers. Whether you enforce logon restrictions with
user rights on local systems or centrally with Authentication Silos make sure
you don’t just use a “fire and forget” approach in which you configure but
neglect monitoring these valuable controls. You need to know when an admin is attempting to circumvent controls or
when an attacker is attempting to move laterally across your network using
harvested credentials.

"This article by Randy Smith was originally published by EventTracker"

Severing the Horizontal Kill Chain: The Role of Micro-Segmentation in Your Virtualization Infrastructure

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:58:16 GMT

Keeping malware off and external threat actors out of your network is definitely important. But equally important is considering how to protect your network if a threat does find its way in.

One of the first goals of any external threat actor after it accesses your organization’s network—whether via spear phishing, social engineering, or some other means of inserting malware onto and compromising a machine—is to spread out within your network and to access and infect as many machines as possible. This strategy is designed to maintain malicious access, should any individual instance of malware infection be discovered. Other attack methods can involve far more advanced and coordinated attacks in which multiple machines are compromised and installed malware lies dormant until triggered remotely.

This reality requires some means to minimize the ability of a threat to spread within your network. In a physical networking environment, isolating malware is difficult without the presence of agent-based software on every endpoint. But a software-defined data center (SDDC) can take advantage of new advances in network virtualization to identify and isolate the threat, integrating best-of-breed security vendor solutions.

In this whitepaper, we’ll discuss network virtualization and micro-segmentation’s role in thwarting attacks. We’ll look at how micro-segmentation is implemented within a virtual infrastructure. And we’ll see how integrating third-party security solutions can provide the highest level of security and protection.

Network Virtualization and the SDDC

Three typical components are found in a data center: compute, storage, and networking. Virtualized compute has been a reality for more than a decade, with virtual storage present for a majority of that time as well. But only with the more recent availability of network virtualization—also known as software-defined networking (SDN)—has a true SDDC come to fruition. Network virtualization brings to the network the same programmatic creation, deletion, snapshotting, and restoration functionality that is employed at a virtual machine (VM) level. With these capabilities, network virtualization goes well beyond just another logical network and completes the vision of the SDDC by making the network software-defined as well.

Simplification of your physical network. Traditionally, the physical network is designed around bandwidth needs, geographic constraints (e.g., buildings, multiple floors, independent locations), and security. By virtualizing your network, you can eliminate the impact of security concerns on the physical design, enabling you to focus solely on bandwidth and geography issues. It’s important to note that to implement SDN, you are not required to reconfigure any part of your physical network; rather, taking advantage of SDN as you build a data center means that you can dramatically simplify the physical network topology.

Agility and speed.Because network services in Layers 2 through 7 have been virtualized, the ability to create a customized virtual network can be achieved in seconds. This option includes benefits for those wanting to isolate a developer network or host a multi-tenant infrastructure.

Automation.Through an API that conforms to Representation State Transfer (a RESTful API) and automation tools, the ability to set up and configure a virtual environment can now include networking in addition to compute, storage, network, and security.

Security.With the agility to build networks quickly comes the ability to implement dynamic security models. This approach includes securing traffic between an application and the virtual client that accesses the application, spinning up a demilitarized zone (DMZ) anywhere, and (as this paper will discuss later) micro-segmenting the network to isolate applications, virtual clients, and virtual servers to sever the horizontal spread of malware throughout a network.

So where does this network virtualization exist?

Network virtualization lives within your hypervisor, acting as an abstraction layer between the physical network and your VMs, applications, and data.

A great example of a network virtualization solution is the VMware NSX platform, part of the VMware vision for the SDDC. NSX virtualizes the network and its physical components, allowing fast, robust configuration and security of a software-defined network.

VMWare NSX

Creating, maintaining, securing, and managing a virtualized network is no simple feat. To help you accomplish all these tasks, NSX is made up of a number of infrastructure components:

Put together, these components provide the management and security foundation to virtualize networking objects that are normally found in a physical environment, including logical switches, routers, firewalls, DHCP servers, and so on, as shown in Figure 1

So, how can the NSX virtualization
platform help improve security and stop the horizontal kill chain?

Implementing Micro-Segmentation with NSX

One of the greatest benefits of network virtualization is the ability to divide a network into smaller virtual zones, called micro-segments. These micro-segments help to isolate services, applications, and VMs, providing protection by making security more dynamic and multilayered.

DFW Rules

DFW rules are much like any rule that you might see on a given firewall. These rules define which traffic is allowed through the firewall by defining source and destination IP addresses, the service that is responsible for the traffic (defined as port-protocol combinations), and the action to be taken (allow/deny) within each rule.

When multiple DFW rules exist, the rule sequence doesn’t come into play—with the exception of deny rules, which take precedence. This scenario further simplifies rule creation and management.

In addition, each rule can either be applied to the default value of every DFW or be applied granularly within the NSX environment to specific VMware vSphere objects, including clusters, datacenters, vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) distributed port groups, logical switches, Edges, host systems, security groups, VMs, or vNICs. Keep in mind that even though a rule is applied to a specific DFW, the source and destination parameters within the rule must match the inspected traffic for the rule action to occur.

Even though DFW rules are useful, applying them to VMs doesn’t seem entirely sensible, does it?

Applying Practical Granularity via Security Tags

If you’re thinking about the practical application of this technology, you might be concerned that the granularity that a DFW rule provides doesn’t align with the way you want to manage server security. Think about it: You want the ability to apply a rule quickly and easily to all your database servers, every VM on a particular host, or every client VM that interacts with protected data (e.g., credit cards, patient information), right?

NSX provides the ability to apply DFW rules in a more user-friendly manner, by using a few pieces of technology within the NSX framework. The first of these pieces is security tags. Individual VMs can be assigned multiple security tags. Because tags are assigned to the VM, the tag remains part of the definition even if the VM is moved.

Tags are used within security policies, the second part of this “practical application” equation. In their most basic sense, security policies define how you want to protect a given VM. Each security policy contains rules that control DFWs, as well as guest-OS and network-introspection controls that integrate with partner solutions to provide additional layers of monitoring and protection. Security policies also have their own weight and inheritance methods to determine which policies are applied first.

So, how do you take advantage of tags and security policies?

The Secret Sauce: Security Groups

What makes NSX micro-segmentation so robust is the use of security groups. Security groups can have multiple security policies assigned to them and define which VMs should have those security policies (and therefore, the DFW rules) applied to them. Security groups employ both static and dynamic memberships to ensure that the most up-to-date policies are applied. This approach is critical, as DFW rules might need to be created and applied in response to a current attack.

As Figure 2 shows, security policies define how protection should be implemented, whereas the security group defines what should be protected.

Figure 2: Security policies and security groups work together to dynamically protect the vSphere environment.

Security group membership is defined using two inclusion sets and one exclusion set:

Dynamic inclusions. A dynamic inclusion set includes matching computer names, OS names, VM names, security tags, and entity values, using comparative criteria statements such as “VM Name Contains ‘Oracle’”. Multiple sets of criteria are supported within a single security group.

Static exclusions. These exclusions are processed after NSX tallies the final list of inclusions, ensuring that exclusions are never overridden.

Because security group members are both statically and dynamically defined, you can use membership to reference common functionality of servers (e.g., every VM running Oracle), location, data-classification levels, environment type (e.g., production versus development), department, and—most important when addressing the horizontal kill chain—current security state.

Dynamic inclusions make micro-segmentation truly useful in this scenario. Third-party vendors can tag a VM based on, say, an antivirus scan or an intrusion detection. A DFW rule (via a security policy) immediately takes effect to isolate the impacted VM and protect the rest of the network from the spread of malware.

Severing the Horizontal Kill Chain … and Beyond

With one of the goals of micro-segmentation being to stop the horizontal kill chain, you must embrace all three parts of the puzzle and configure DFW rules to isolate server, application, and client traffic, thus minimizing the risk of intrusion or infection in the first place. But it’s the addition of security policies and the dynamic inclusions within security groups that make DFW rules a granular, responsive tool.

By utilizing all three pieces—along with integrated third-party solutions that monitor and scan for intrusions, breaches, inappropriate access, malware, viruses, and more as the basis for security group membership—the simple DFW becomes the foundation for a powerful and flexible way of halting inappropriate and potentially malicious east-west traffic between VMs.

Getting to Zero Trust

Micro-segmentation can also be used to implement a zero-trust security model within your virtual network, in which no entity—users, devices, applications, or any other—has a default level of trust. This is based on the “never trust, always verify” security approach first proposed by Forrester Research.

Applying this approach within the context of micro-segmentation creates as secure an environment as possible. To do so, you’ll need to follow these steps:

Baseline. Start with an approved set of allow rules for a given set of traffic between VMs and a default rule that Allows bus also Logs.

Analyze. Review the traffic that the existing allow rules are not catching.

Secure. Add more rules, taking advantage of more than just simple IP addresses.

Repeat. Continue to analyze and add rules; the amount of traffic in the log decreases in response.

Deny. Add temporary deny rules and, after you’re certain that all appropriate traffic is accounted for in your allow rules, add a final default rule to block all remaining traffic.

Micro-segmentation doesn’t get your organization all the way to zero trust. However, it does put in place a least privilege environment that aligns with the foundational goal of zero trust by limiting which VMs and applications can traverse a given virtualized network path.

Beyond Micro-Segmentation with Symantec

NSX is much more than micro-segmentation; it’s an extensible framework that allows security vendors like Symantec to leverage their security services, while extending the ability to protect and respond.

Without network virtualization (and all the capabilities it brings), malware on a given VM would certainly be detected, quarantined, and removed by AV at an OS level, with perhaps an alert sent. But with Guest and Network introspection rules (as part of an NSX Security policy), a vendor like Symantec can do some amazingly powerful and proactive protection of the network.

Protection starts with an NSX traffic shaping policy, to steer network traffic to a Symantec virtual appliance running on the same ESX host to facilitate the inspection of packets for malware. This can be accomplished for both east-west (server-server) and north-south (client-server) traffic. To optimize throughput of steered traffic, Symantec uses specific signatures tailored to certain workloads (for example, an Exchange server – the signature would contain traffic such as pop, smtp, imap, etc.). Should suspect traffic be found, a dynamic inclusion within a Security Group is triggered via a tag, causing more restrictive predefined Security Policies to activate and quarantine the system. Once malware is deleted from the VM in question, the tag is removed, causing it to be allowed back on the environment.

Traditional malware scans can also be used to establish tags and dynamic Security Group inclusions using Symantec’s agentless architecture. To optimize this process, all machines on a given ESX host are initially scanned, creating cached hashes of all files across all VMs on that host. As files are access, the hash is sent to the virtual appliance to be compared with the scan hash to speed up the AV scan process while maintaining the same level of protection as agent-based AV.

Achieving Better Security through Micro-Segmentation

Even as organizations move to a true SDDC, the reality of external threats grows, requiring those same organizations to implement new technologies and security methods to minimize the risk. Advances in network virtualization have made the implementation, maintenance, and security of virtual environments easier, faster, and more responsive to current business needs.

Micro-segmentation, as part of an overall network virtualization implementation, provides a means to dynamically manage the security of VMs, based on a variety of offerings and usage factors. But micro-segmentation will take your security only so far; in and of itself, it is only a means to establish a secure configuration.

Truly addressing the horizontal kill chain of attacks requires the addition of third-party security solutions to provide context around the proper micro-segmentation configuration. These solutions first identify when an attack occurs, use integration with network virtualization to isolate the threat, and allow the entire environment to remain secure while the threat is neutralized.

ABOUT SYMANTEC

Since its inception in 1982, Symantec has grown into a Fortune 500 company through a combination of internal development, strategic acquisition and partnering with industry leaders. At every step in the company’s growth we have expanded both our technological expertise and our understanding of customer needs. Our ability to successfully integrate internally developed with technologies we acquire has kept Symantec at the front of its industry and enabled us to provide best-of-breed solutions for millions of corporate and individual customers in more than 48 countries. It is what has earned the company almost every major technology award and top-tier rankings from industry analysts. www.Symantec.com

ABOUT RANDY FRANKLIN SMITH

Randy Franklin Smith is an internationally recognized expert on the security and control of Windows and AD security. Randy publishes www.UltimateWindowsSecurity.com and wrote The Windows Server 2008 Security Log Revealed—the only book devoted to the Windows security log. Randy is the creator of LOGbinder software, which makes cryptic application logs understandable and available to log-management and SIEM solutions. As a Certified Information Systems Auditor, Randy performs security reviews for clients ranging from small, privately held firms to Fortune 500 companies, national, and international organizations. Randy is also a Microsoft Security Most Valuable Professional. www.UltimateWindowsSecurity.com

5 Indicators of Endpoint Evil

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 16:16:12 GMT

With so much focus on security these days, you’d
think IT would be winning the battle against malware and other threats. But all
too often,
a lack of focus on certain areas of the
network leads to a decrease in an organization’s security posture and an
increase in risk.

The endpoint is such an area. Endpoints have more
than the ability to reach beyond the protective layers of
internal security—they’re allowed to do so.
End user behaviors such as working from outside the office,
connecting to unsecured WiFi networks, visiting potentially dangerous websites,
and opening email with malicious
attachments or links all make endpoints a particularly
vulnerable attack vector with access to your organization’s network.

According to a recent Ponemon report 80 percent of
organizations are seeing web-born malware attacks. Sixty-five percent have
experienced rootkit attacks and 55 percent have encountered spear
phishing—all on a frequent basis.

And when malware and endpoints mix, the attack
doesn’t stop with a single infected machine. Rather, that first infection turns
the machine into what is commonly known as
a beachhead. From there, malware is
designed to spread laterally throughout your network, in an effort to maximize
the chances of obtaining valuable credentials or data.

Although your thoughts might immediately go to
attack mitigation and prevention, most organizations—a whopping 70 percent,
according to the Ponemon study—have difficulty enforcing endpoint security
policies.
Rather, detection is a key aspect of any
strategy. The best approach is to use the endpoint as a sensor, collecting
state information, understanding which behavior is normal, and identifying what
isn’t.

In this whitepaper, we focus on five trouble
indicators, each of which provides additional context around what to look for
on your endpoints:

Rogue processes

Evidence of
persistence

Suspicious traffic
Activity and user-role mismatches

Unusual OS
artifacts

For each indicator, we tell you what to look for,
as well as which tools you can use to identify and gather intelligence around
the malicious code that might be lurking within your endpoints.

Indicator #1: Rogue Processes

Successful attackers depend on their malware to go
undetected. After all, malicious remote administration tools (RATs) are
designed to provide access to the command prompt, file system, registry,
hardware, remote control, and more, with the purpose of
providing many ways to find, extract, hold hostage, or destroy your
organization’s critical information. If RATs were easy to find, the attack
wouldn’t stand a chance—so attackers use several methods to
obfuscate their presence.

Evil Methods

Process looks
good … on the surface. The process name (such as explorer.exe) is
right, but the parent process, logon user, or file path is incorrect. You need
to look not just
at the process in question, but also at the process that
started it. If that process is not standard, it could indicate that the child
process is a rogue process. Another method that attackers use is
a clever misspelling of the file name. For example, a rogue
file might be named scvhost.exe instead of svchost.exe—a spelling that is so
close, you would probably need to compare file names to confirm the
misspelling.

Suspicious DLL
execution. Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) contain modular code to help
support a main application. Attackers often take advantage of the fact that
parts of the core Windows OS heavily utilize DLLs:

rundll32.exe. Known as a command
line utility program, rundll32.exe is responsible for running DLLs by invoking
a function that is exported from a specific 16-bit or 32-bit DLL module.

svchost.exe. Svchost is a generic
Windows OS program that hosts approved Windows services. Malicious applications can be formed as DLLs
specifically made to work with svchost.exe and trick it into running
them.

Other legitimate
processes. The use of DLLs is common, so rogue DLLs can also be
loaded into an otherwise benign application.

Rootkits. These are nasty stuff.
By definition, they take advantage of administrative (root) access, embed
themselves into an OS, and then intelligently evade detection.

Regardless of the tactic used, the goal of rogue
processes is either to make the process look legitimate or to use a legitimate
process to launch a malicious DLL, making it more difficult to identify and
track via the security log.

Detecting Rogue Processes

Ideally, you have a centralized way to collect
relevant process information across your network and automatically identify
rogue processes—capabilities that are available via solutions like
EventTracker.
Here is the kind of analysis required to catch rogue
processes.

Analyze event ID
4688. This event is generated each time a new process is created. The
event provides relevant information that you can use to identify rogue
processes. As Figure 1 shows, this information includes the name of the user
account that launched
the process, the date and time the program started, the
process ID, the parent (creator) process ID, and the full path of the process
executable.

Note: Although this event shows
the Creator Process ID, there is no associated name or a full path to that
process, which is an important piece in determining whether a process is rogue.
The parent (creator)process can be determined by manually searching for an
earlier 4688 event with
a New Process ID that matches this Creator Process ID value.

After enabling Audit process
events via Group Policy, your endpoints will log a massive number of
events, so although this is a valuable way to get information, you’ll also need
to wade through a sea of data. Furthermore, the event is not generated when
DLLs are loaded, only when new processes are started.
So if the rogue process is a DLL hiding in a file such as
svchost.exe, the event logs won’t contain any clue that it was invoked.
However, after you identify something amiss on a given machine, memory
forensics tools such as those from the Volatility Foundation
can
help provide further forensics detail when DLLs are injected
or rootkits installed.

Check for
unsigned code/Malware and viruses are often attached to legitimate
executables from known or somewhat known entities. Program files that are
signed declare the publisher and confirms that has not been modified by an
attacker. Since unsigned files don’t have this assurance, unsigned code
might indicate potential malware – you just can’t tell. Note
that Windows 8 and earlier default to allowing unsigned code to run.

Several tools can audit and analyze running
processes on a machine. Although not enterprise-caliber tools, these can be
useful in tracking down issues on a per-machine basis:

Check programs
against the National Software Reference Library (NSRL). This library
(available at http://www.nsrl.nist.gov) is a joint effort between the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security; federal, state, and local law enforcement; and
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to collect software
from various sources and incorporate file profiles into a reference library to
be used in the investigation of crimes involving computers.

At the end of the day, the trick to detecting rogue
processes is to know what should and should not be running on your Windows
endpoints. If you’re using a golden image, this exercise should be relatively
simple: compare the running processes with a known list. But if every machine
is somewhat different, you might need to start with a basic list of what should
be running and then use the methods here to detect what falls out of the
norm.

Detecting Rogue Processes with
EventTracker

Even with the appropriate auditing policies turned
on, you will need to do a fair amount of detective work to get a complete
picture of which processes are running and whether they are rogue.
EventTracker’s sensor collects pertinent information—including process, file,
creator, hash, and signer details—and intelligently present it as a single
event, as shown in Figure 2. This approach creates centralized details that are
easily available for security information and event management (SIEM) solutions
to
digest and act on.

In addition, other events, such as Exchange message
tracking, provide critical details. In the example that Figure 3 shows, you can
use the originating IP address, email subject, sender and recipient addresses,
and more to identify how rogue processes might be entering the
organization.

Moreover, EventTracker automatically compares
program files against the National Software Reference Library, looks for
unsigned code and alerts you to these and other suspicious
indicators.

Indicator #2: Evidence of Persistence

An attacker doesn’t want to retain control of your
endpoints for a short period; their malicious code needs ample time to permeate
your network to give them the greatest chance of finding just the right
credentials and give them access to valuable information. Attackers need to
ensure that their code can live on so that they can resume control even after
the closing of a process, a logoff, or a reboot.

Evil Methods

This list, though not exhaustive, represents many
ways that attackers ensure their malicious code remains actively running and in
existence on the endpoint.

Tasks.
Use of the AT command or scheduling tasks to run every minute or at logon, can
cause an endpoint to continually relaunch a malicious process.

Tampering with
services. Replacing service path settings in the registry or
replacing a service executable can launch malicious processes at boot up. In
addition, new services are created with generic but official-looking names such
as Windows Services Update, to throw you off the scent. MSInfo is a good
starting point to identify those services that aren’t required.

Auto-run registry
settings. The Run and RunOnce
settings found in several locations in the registry are perfect places to
nestle a reference to a malicious executable. MSInfo can play a role in
identifying what is configured to launch at bootup and logon.

DLL tampering or
interception. The basic premise is either to modify the DLL’s import
table to reference a malicious function or to modify the DLL code itself to
detour to your code and then return it to its normal function.

PowerShell
background jobs. A PowerShell process is spawned in the background
and runs the code necessary to keep the malicious process resident.

Local Group
Policy. Group Policy contains a place to configure both startup
scripts and logon scripts.

Browser add-ins
and plug-ins. Browsers have the potential for a lot of local access
to the endpoint, giving a browser the ability to re-infect a machine every time
it is opened.

Detecting Persistence

Look to the same methods that attackers use der to
find entries that are designed to guarantee persistence.
Note: Many malicious processes use more than one method to
redundantly ensure their survival. Finding references to a rogue process in any
of these locations is a indicator that it might be malicious.

Indicator #3: Suspicious traffic

Malicious code on an endpoint doesn’t exist simply
to sit there. It’s designed to replicate itself within the network and to
ultimately exfiltrate information from the network. Therefore, traffic
monitoring is another way to identify the existence of malicious
code.

You might think that you can simply use your
network monitoring sensors to pick up suspicious traffic. However, the reality
is that you need additional context only available on the endpoint, such as the
executable that is used to generate traffic, to ensure proper identification of
suspicious activity.

Evil Methods

If you find the following on your endpoints, they
could equate to suspicious network traffic:

Use of browser
ports by non-browsers. Ports 80, 443, or 8080 should represent web
services. Attackers use these ports to update code and exfiltrate data because
the ports are always left open on your firewall. Network packets show you only
which endpoint sent traffic over which port to which IP address; they won’t
show that the traffic was a rogue DLL called by svchost.exe that was used to
send data.

Use of browsers
over non-standard ports. Any browser not using standard ports, such
as 80, 443, or 8080, could indicate a valid process (your browsers) with a
malicious purpose.

Unexpected
traffic. Traffic might seem normal but become suspect when you
consider either the source or the target. A few examples include web traffic to
an IP address instead of a fully qualified domain name (FQDN); Remote Desktop
Protocol (RDP), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), or Secure Shell (SSH) sessions
from abnormal endpoints; and even outbound Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
sessions to an external host.

Detecting Suspicious Traffic

As mentioned earlier, just using a network sensor
lacks context. You need to know not only from which endpoint traffic
originated, but also from which process. There are a few steps you can take to
investigate suspicious traffic:

Monitor events
5154, 5155, 5156, and 5157. These events come from the Windows
Filtering Platform (WFP) and help to document the permitting and blocking of
inbound and outbound TCP or UDP connections. In each of these events, the
process ID, application path, source and destination IP
addresses, ports, and protocol are all documented, providing
you context around whether the combination of processes and ports adds up to
malicious or appropriate traffic.

Monitor outbound
DNS requests for unusual domain names. What determines “unusual”? Use
of a reputation service might be a good fit to help provide guidelines around
appropriate domain names.

The overarching goal is to use the combination of traffic
patterns, the processes that generate them and the type of endpoint to
establish suspicion. Without a third-party solution, you’ll need to look
granularly at specific endpoints, searching for these mismatches of processes
and traffic patterns.

Indicator #4: Activity and User-Role
Mismatches

An attacker will use any means necessary to spread
malicious code laterally throughout the organization and exfiltrate data—even
if it means doing so in a way that doesn’t fit the normal mode of operation for
the user of the endpoint. Therefore, look for anomalies in which activity
doesn’t align with the user’s role in the organization. For example, consider
traffic for a
given type of endpoint, such as an RDP session coming from
the desktop of a user in Accounting. If their workstation has never started an
RDP session in the past but suddenly does so now, you have a potential
candidate for an infected endpoint.

Evil Methods

As suspicious traffic can be indicative of
malicious code, so can the use of tools that are rarely, if ever, used by
non-IT users:

Utilities. Many of the tools that
IT considers foundational to configuring and supporting endpoints and networks
are all but a foreign language to regular users. This list includes (but is not
limited to) cmd.exe, rar.exe, at.exe, schtasks.exe, wmic.exe, powershell.exe,
winrm.vbs, net.exe, reg.exe, sc.exe, netstat.exe, and route.exe

Remote
sessions. We’ve talked about RDP from a traffic standpoint, but you
should also watch for it from an activity standpoint. Normal users (except thin
client and VDI users) usually have no need to connect to a server via RDP.

Unique mismatches
in your environment. You should devote some time to comparing the
usage difference between end-user and admin endpoints to determine which
applications (via processes) they normally run to create a profile.

Detecting Activity and User-Role
Mismatches

The simplest distinction to make is whether an
endpoint is normally used by a user or someone in IT. But in your organization,
the issue might be more complex than that; a user might be responsible for
initiating managed file transfers as part of their job, so an FTP session might
be in order. No matter the complexity of roles within your organization,
identifying roles and their corresponding profile of activity is the first step.

Next, identify which applications are being used. This
step is much more difficult to accomplish without at least a simple tool, such
as the old Process Monitor from Systernals with output to a CSV file.

Indicator #5: Unusual OS Artifacts

It’s very difficult for attackers not leave some
kind of trace in Windows of their presence. Knowing what to look for can help
you catchattackers at any point in the process.

The point here is to search out things not normally
found on end-user workstations. Here are a few examples:

Scripts. If PowerShell, VB
Script, or even a command prompt was used to execute a command script, scripts
might be left over, leaving clues as to what was executed.

Shared folders on an endpoint.
Because exfiltration of data is a large part of these attacks, simple shared
folders might be used to centralize obtained files so that they can be
exfiltrated from a single machine.

Shared folders access by an
endpoint. Looking at the previous artifact from the other
perspective, a given endpoint might have been used to connect to a central
share. A review in the registry of the following key can provide more detail on
which shares have been accessed:
KEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2

Shining the Spotlight on Endpoint Evil

Endpoints are here to stay for most organizations
and will continue to be a major risk area. Using the endpoint itself as a
security sensor—one that can provide information, detail, and context of
attempted breaches—can provide IT with the intelligence it requires to properly
detect and respond to attacks.

Much of the work highlighted in this paper requires
a massive amount of effort once you move past just a few endpoints. The only
way to catch attackers using these methods is to automate and EventTracker is
leading the way. EventTracker’s mature SIEM engine provides the centralized
analysis and point of management needed to handle thousands of endpoints.
Moreover, on the endpoint, EventTracker has advanced beyond the traditional
SIEM agent. EventTracker empowers your endpoints as
security sensors where you need them the most. Instead of
just forwarding event logs, EventTrackers sensor-agent watches system activity
in real-time on each and every endpoint looking for the indicators discussed in
this paper. With EventTracker you get visibility and alerting to a depth and
currency only possible with by leveraging agents on the endpoint.

EventTracker was founded in 1999 and is privately
funded and held. Our corporate headquarters are located in Columbia, Maryland
in the Baltimore-Washington high tech corridor, with research and development
facilities located in both Columbia and Bangalore, India.
www.eventtracker.com

ABOUT RANDY FRANKLIN SMITH

Randy Franklin Smith is an internationally
recognized expert on the security and control of Windows and AD security. Randy
publishes
www.UltimateWindowsSecurity.com and wrote The Windows Server 2008
Security Log Revealed—the only book devoted to the Windows security log. Randy
is the creator of LOGbinder software, which makes cryptic application logs
understandable and available to log-management and SIEM solutions. As a
Certified Information Systems Auditor, Randy performs security reviews for
clients ranging from small, privately held firms to
Fortune 500 companies, national, and international
organizations. Randy is also a Microsoft Security Most Valuable
Professional.

Detecting Ransomware: The Same as Detecting Any Kind of Malware?

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 13:02:22 GMT

Ransomware has burst onto the scene with high profile
attacks against hospitals and other organizations. How do you detect ransomware? Ransomware is just another kind of malware
and there’s nothing particularly advanced about ransomware compared to other
malware.

Ransomware uses the same methods to initially infect an
endpoint such as drive-by-downloads, phishing emails, etc. Then it generates necessary encryption keys,
communicates with command and control servers and gets down to business
encrypting every file on the compromised endpoint. Once that’s done it displays
the ransom message and waits for the user to enter an unlock code purchased
from the criminals. So at the initial stages
of attack, trying to detect ransomware is like any other end-point based
malware. You look for new EXEs and DLLs
and other executable content like scripts. For this level of detection check out my earlier webinars with
EventTracker

As criminals begin to move from consumer attacks to
targeting the enterprise, we are going to see more lateral movement between
systems as the attackers try to either encrypt enough endpoints or work their way
across the network to one or more critical servers. In either case their attacks will take a
little longer before they pull the trigger and display the ransom message
because they need to encrypt enough end-user endpoints or at least one critical
server to bring the organization to its knees. These attacks begin to look similar to a persistent data theft (aka APT)
attack.

When ransomware begins encrypting files it’s going to
generate a massive amount of file i/o – both read and write. It has to read every file and write every
file back out in encrypted format. The
write activity may occur on the same file if directly being re-written, the
ransomware can delete the original file after writing out an encrypted
copy. In addition, if you watch which
files ransomware is opening you’ll see every file in each folder being opened one
file after another for at least read access. You will also see that read activity in bytes should be matched by write
activity.

Of course there are potential ways ransomware could cloak
this activity by either going low and slow, encrypting files over many days or
by scattering its file access between many different folders instead of
following an orderly process of all files in one folder after another. But I think it will a long time before enough
attacks are getting foiled by such detection techniques that the attackers go
to this extra effort.

How prone to false positives is this tactic? Well, what other legitimate applications have
a similar file i/o signature? I can't think of any. Backup and indexing
programs would have a nearly identical file read
signature but would lack the equal amount of write activity.

The downside to ransomware detonation monitoring is that
detection means a ransomware attack is well underway. This is late stage notification.

Speed

Ransomware attacks against an enterprise may proceed much
faster than persistent data theft attacks because data thieves have to find and
gain access to the data that is not just confidential but also re-saleable or
otherwise valuable to the attacker. That
may take months. On the other hand,
ransomware criminals just need to either:

Lockdown at least one critical server – without
which the organization can’t function. The
server doesn’t necessarily need any confidential data nor need it be
re-saleable. On a typical network
there’s many more such critical servers than there are servers with data that’s
valuable to the bad guy for re-sale or other exploitation.

Forget servers and just spread to as many
end-user endpoints as possible. If you
encrypt enough endpoints and render them useless you can ransom the
organization without compromising and servers at all. Endpoints are typically much easier to
compromise because of their intimate exposure and processing of untrusted
content and usage by less security savvy end-users among other reasons.

So beefing up your ransomware monitoring means doing what
you hopefully are already doing: monitoring for indicators of any type of
malware on your network and watching for signs of lateral movement between
systems. But for ransomware you can also
possibly detect late stage ransomware attacks by watching for signature file
i/o by unusual processes. So you need to
be fast in responding.

And that’s the other way that ransomware differentiates
itself from data theft attacks: the need for speed. Ransomware attacks can potentially reach
detonation much faster than data thieves can find, gain access and exfiltrate
data worth stealing. So, while the
indicators of compromise might be the same for most of all ransomware or
persistent data theft attack, reducing your time-to-response is even more
important with ransomware.

“This article by Randy Smith was originally published by EventTracker”

Cloud Security Starts at Home

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 10:28:14 GMT

Cloud security is getting attention and that’s as it should
be. But before you get hung up on techie
security details like whether SAML is more secure than OpenID Connect and the
like, it’s good to take a step back. One
of the tenets of information security is to follow the risk. Risk is largely a measure of damage and likelihood. When you are looking at different threats to
the same cloud-based data then it becomes a function of the likelihood of those
risks.

In the cloud we worry about the technology and the host of
the cloud. Let’s focus on
industrial-strength infrastructure and platform-as-a-service clouds like AWS
and Azure. And let’s throw in O365 –
it’s not infrastructure or platform but it’s scale and quality of hosting fits
our purposes in terms of security and risk. I don’t have any special affection for any of the cloud providers but
it’s a fact that they have the scale to do a better, more comprehensive, more
active job on security that my little company does and I’m far from alone. This level of cloud doesn’t historically get
hacked because of stupid operational mistakes or flimsy coding practices with
cryptography and password handling. Or
because of obscure vulnerabilities in standards like SAML and OpenID Connect (they
are present). It’s because of tenant-vectored risks. Either poor security practices by the
tenant’s admins or vulnerabilities in the tenant’s technology which the cloud
is exposed to or on which it is reliant.

Here are just a few scenarios of cloud intrusions with a
tenant origin vector

Tenant
Vulnerability

Cloud
Intrusion

1

Admin’s PC infected
with malware

Cloud tenant admin password stolen

2

Tenant’s on-prem network
penetrated

VPN connection between cloud and on-prem network

3

Tenant’s
Active Directory unmonitored

Federation/synchronization with on-prem AD results
in an on-prem admin’s account having privileged access to the cloud.

I’m going to focus on the latter scenario. The point is that most organizations integrate their cloud with their
on-prem Active Directory and that’s as it should be. We hardly want to go back to the inefficient
and insecure world of countless user accounts and passwords per person. We were able to largely reduce that of the
years by bringing more and more on-prem apps, databases and systems online with
Active Directory. Let’s not lose ground
on that with the cloud.

But your greatest risk in the cloud might just be right
under your nose here in AD on your local network. Do you monitor changes in Active
Directory? Are you aware when there are
failed logons or unusual logons to privileged accounts? And I’m not just talking about admin
accounts. Really, just as important, are
those user accounts who have access to the data that your security measures are
all about. So that means identifying not
just the IT groups in AD but also those groups which are used to entitle users
to that important data. Very likely some
of those groups are re-used in the cloud to entitle users there as well. Of course the same goes for the actual user
accounts.

Even for those of us who can say our network isn’t connected
by VPN or any direct connections (like ExpressRoute for Azure/O365) and there’s
no federation or sync between our on-prem and cloud directories your on-prem,
internal security efforts will make or break your security in the cloud and
that’s simply because of #1. At some
point your cloud admin has to connect to the cloud from some device. And if that device isn’t secure or the cloud
admin’s credential handling is lax you’re in trouble.

That’s why I say that for most of us in the cloud need to
first look inward for risks. Monitoring
as always is key. The detective control
you get with a well implemented and correctly used SIEM is incredible and often
the only control you can deploy at key points, technologies or processes in
your network.

"This
article by Randy Smith was originally published by EventTracker."

The Leftovers: A Data Recovery Study

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 08:17:08 GMT

I did a webinar a
while back with Paul Henry on “What One Digital Forensics Expert Found On
Hundreds of Hard Drives, iPhones and Android Devices” which was sponsored by
Blancco Technology Group who makes really cool data erasure software for
the enterprise.

Blancco has released a
whitepaper, The Leftovers: A Data
Recovery Study, based on the same work that Paul did. To demonstrate just
how easy, common and dangerous it is when data is improperly removed before
used electronics are resold, Blancco Technology Group purchased a total of 200
used hard disk drives and solid state drives from eBay and Craigslist in
the first quarter of 2016.

Upon analyzing the 200
used drives, company emails were recovered on 9 percent of the drives, followed
by spreadsheets containing sales projections and product inventories (5
percent) and CRM records (1 percent).

36 percent of the used
HDDs/SSDs containing residual data had data improperly deleted from them by
simply dragging files to the ‘Recycle Bin’ or using the basic delete button.

Keeping An Eye on Your Unix & Linux Privileged Accounts

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 10:27:03 GMT

With sudo you can give admins the authority they need without giving away root and all the security risks and compliance problems caused by doing so. But once you carefully delegate limited, privileged authority with sudo you still need an audit trail of what admins are doing. A privileged user audit trail is irreplaceable as a deterrent and detective control over admins and in terms of implementing basic accountability. But in today’s environment of advanced and persistent attackers you also need the ability to actively monitor privileged user activity for quick detection of suspicious events.

In this webinar, I'll dive into the logging capabilities of sudo. Sudo provides event auditing for tracking command execution by sudoers – both for successful and denied sudo requests as well as errors. I'll show you how to enable sudo auditing and how to control where it’s logged, if syslog is used and more importantly: what do sudo logs looks like and how do you interpret them?

But sudo also offers session auditing (aka the iolog) which allows you to capture entire sudo sessions including both input and output of commands executed through sudo whether in an interactive shell or via script. I'll demonstrate how to configure sudo session logging and how to view recorded sessions with sudoreplay.

After, BeyondTrust Product Manager, Paul Harper will walk you through how to augment sudo for complete control and auditing over Unix and Linux user activity.

Secure, Fast and Efficient Password Management

Mon, 23 May 2016 14:33:37 GMT

All the way back in the late 90’s I realized that passwords,
even for myself, were a big vulnerability. With more websites requiring logins I realized that my multiplying
“Post-It Note” situation was not going to work. This left me two options:

A password protected word doc full of usernames and
passwords.

A unique username with one password used for all
accounts.

You can easily see that neither of those two options were
secure or viable. At that time
especially, document encryption was either easy but way weak or strong but
highly inconvenient. Besides who wants
to copy and paste all the time? And then
worry about your password sitting around in your clipboard? The risks go on and on. So as most InfoSec techies would do – I
turned to Google. In those days a google
search of “password manager” turned up much less results than the 48,000,000+
results you will get today.

After a bit of research, I decided to test a password
manager product by RoboForm. Little did I know that 17 years later; using RoboForm
would be a de facto standard at my company. I remember one of our contractors had his web-based email compromised
and it took him half a day to login into each of his online accounts and
change all his passwords since he was using one password for all accounts. He is now a RoboForm
user.

RoboForm
allows you to use unique usernames and unique passwords for each web login you
have. It will actually help generate
unique passwords using the character limits you specify and then save these
complex passwords to your system under “lock and key”.

Fig 1. - Password requirement options

You only need to remember one unique master password to gain
access to all of your RoboForm complex passwords. When you visit the logon
page of a website, RoboForm automatically senses it and allows you to fill in
your credentials with a single click. If
your device is lost or stolen or malware compromises your computer, the files
containing your credentials are encrypted with a key derived from your master
password.

Fig 2. - A single click on the login named “Dev” will
fill and submit the login

Of course we’ve seen over and over again that encryption is
complex and programmers often do it wrong. I trust RoboForm’s encryption. They take a no compromise approach to security. The master password is not stored anywhere
except your head; not locally and not on RoboForm’s servers. “RoboForm’s servers?” you ask? Yes, if you
choose to use the feature, RoboForm uploads all your usernames and passwords to
their server which then allows all your devices with RoboForm to share
up-to-date credentials. This is called RoboForm
Everywhere and it works awesome. Whether I’m on my desktop, Surface, smartphone or tablet I always have
my passwords without sacrificing security.

You are probably asking, and rightly so, “How good is the
protection in RoboForm’s ‘cloud’?” Well,
first, you have a password on your RoboForm everywhere account – different than
your master password which is used for encryption. But even if the RoboForm cloud is compromised
(and we’ve already seen this happen to other password managers repeatedly) your
credentials are still protected. RoboForm’s no-compromise approach on security means that they simply do
not have your master password. Your
credentials stored in the cloud are encrypted with the same key derived from
your master password just like the files on your local Windows or mobile
device. So memorize a good master
password and don’t use it for anything else than RoboForm.

If you have a compatible finger-print reader and trust
Windows security you can protect your master password with your
fingerprint. To unlock RoboForm, you
provide your fingerprint and avoid entering even your master password. Are their risks to that? Yes, but it’s up to you. You don’t have to use it.

RoboForm has a few products but everyone at my company uses RoboForm
Everywhere which gives you the added benefit of syncing these passwords across
multiple systems, mobile devices and tablets. RoboForm also has a built in browser which means no cumbersome copying
and pasting of passwords on your mobile devices.

In 1980, password management wouldn’t have been an issue but
nowadays, if you’re like me, you have a plethora of online user accounts, not
to mention Windows Security popups which RoboForm also manages. Personally I have 500+ unique logins and this
is only in my “Personal” folder (I keep my logins organized so I also have a
“Work” folder).

Fig 3. – Roboform also manages Windows Security popups

I should also mention that RoboForm can manage identities if
you choose to use it as well as financial info like banking details and credit
card data which makes every merchant site payment process almost as user
friendly and fast as Amazon. The Safenote
feature is also very useful allowing you to secure and lockdown your virtual
“Post-It Notes”.

I recommend that you give RoboForm a
try. You can get it completely free with
a 10 saved login limit. If you are still
in college you can actually get RoboForm completely free with unlimited
logins. You can get the 1st
year of RoboForm Everywhere 50% off by clicking here.

Stay tuned for another blog next month where I go in depth
on a unique use case using RoboForm and some isolated servers we use for high
security functions in our organization.

Get rid of QuickTime as Quickly and Efficiently – For FREE!

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 12:53:01 GMT

Hi folks. If you are
wondering how many computers on your network have QuickTime installed and how
to get rid of it, I’ve got some help for you in the form of a video, PowerShell
script, AppLocker policy and free tools from SolarWinds. If you don’t already know why it’s urgent to
uninstall QuickTime, be aware that Apple has announced it’s no longer
supporting QuickTime for Windows even though TrendMicro has announced 2
zero-day heap corruption vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution. According to my understanding of this, Apple
never provided any warning that they’d stop patching their software. That’s really lame. You have to say this for Microsoft, they give
you warning. So every Windows endpoint
with QuickTime installed is a sitting duck.
Even the Department of Homeland Security is warning folks to kill
QuickTime before the bad guys exploit it against you and your network.

i. We got the folks at SolarWinds
to post a report on Thwack that reports all computers with QuickTime installed.

b.Remotely un-install QuickTime from those PCs

c. Without installing any agents!

2. Or you can use AppLocker to block QuickTime from executing on PCs where it is installed

I recommend using the SolarWinds
Patch Manager option because it’s fast, easy and free and it eliminates the risk by
uninstalling QuickTime. My alternative
AppLocker procedure only blocks QuickTime; it doesn’t install it and it doesn’t
address malware that knows how to bypass the Application Identity service.

If you are going to the 30-day trial of SolarWinds
Patch Manager to remove QuickTime please use
this URL to download it because that helps us keep the lights on here at
UltimateWindowsSecurity. And don’t
worry, the good folks at SolarWinds
are good with you using the eval to solve this problem. You might want to keep Patch Manager once you
see it. After explaining how to use it
to get rid of QuickTime I’ll explain why I like Patch Manager.

Download
PatchManager and install it. Watch
Barry’s video to help you save time. It
only takes Barry 11 minutes to install Patch Manager, find all the PCs with
QuickTime and uninstall it. Follow along
with Barry and you’ll be done in time to take the rest of the morning off.

If you are interested in my alternative (and less secure)
AppLocker method, watch this video.

Both methods work without agents! But only Patch Manager actually eliminates
the risk. And the no agent thing is what
I love about Patch Manager. It provides
software inventory and 3rd party patching (Adobe, Java, Apple, etc)
without requiring you to install yet another agent. How does it do it? It’s pretty cool. Patch Manager uses WMI for
querying PCs but then it leverages the already existing Windows Update agent
baked into every Windows computer to push 3rd party patches
and of course Microsoft patches too. It
does this through a really cool integration with WSUS.

So you get the best of both worlds. Leverage the built-in infrastructure Windows
already provides for patching Microsoft products to patch 3rd party
products too! Brilliant. Again, if you want to use Patch Manager for getting
rid of QuickTime for free or just want to try it out, please use
this URL. It helps fund our research
and real training for free we provide nearly each week.